Assistant Professor Matt Lease has accomplished a rare feat for a young faculty member, securing three prestigious early career awards in one year from federal government agencies. "To receive one career award from a federal funding agency is recognition of early prominence and a strong predictor of future scholarly impact," said Dean Andrew Dillon. "To receive three, all in one year, is unprecedented in my experience. In the true spirit of the iSchool, Matt's work crosses disciplinary boundaries and I am convinced his work has the potential to solve pressing information problems in the years ahead."
•His $550,000 early career award from the National Science Foundation will support study of how crowdsourcing approaches can be more widely viable and lower risk for potential adopters. MORE...
•To advance curation and archival practices for conversational speech, Lease received $290,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. As an exemplar test case, his research will focus on the University of Southern California's Shoah Foundation oral history interviews of Holocaust eyewitnesses. MORE...
•Complementing his IMLS project, Lease's $300,000 Young Faculty Award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is applying enhanced speech transcription technology to improve search engine technology for searching conversational speech archives. Lease already has begun to establish himself as a leading expert on crowdsourcing, and the three early career grants will allow him to delve even more deeply into the topic. MORE...